Tomlinson-Harashima Precoding (THP) was invented by Tomlinson and Harashima for channel equalization, and has been widely used in DSL systems, voice band and cable modems. Unlike decision feedback equalization where channel equalization takes place at the receive side, THP is a transmitter technique where equalization is performed at the transmitter side. It may eliminate error propagation and allow the use of current capacity-achieving channel codes, such as low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes in a natural way.
THP converts an inter-symbol interference (ISI) channel to a near additive white gaussian noise (AWGN) channel and allows the system to take full advantage of current capacity-achieving error correction codes. Like decision feedback equalizers, Tomlinson-Harashima (TH) precoders contain nonlinear feedback loops, which limit their use for high speed applications. The speed of TH precoders is limited by the sum of the computation times of two additions and one multiplication. Unlike decision feedback equalization where the output levels of the nonlinear devices (quantizers) are finite, in TH precoders the output levels of the modulo devices are infinite, or finite but very large. Thus, it is difficult to apply look-ahead and pre-computation techniques to pipeline TH precoders, which were successfully applied to pipeline Decision Feedback Equalizers (DFEs) in the past.
Recently, TH precoding has been proposed to be used in 10 Gigabit Ethernet over copper. The symbol rate of 10GBASE-T is expected to be around 800 Mega Baud. However, TH precoders contain feedback loops, so it is hard to clock them at such high speed. Thus, the high speed design of TH precoders is of great interest.